Fever
by jeeno2
Summary: Nothing else would ever hurt as good as this.


_a/n: Written for the "violet" prompt in August, 2014's Prompts in Panem._

* * *

The two of them together were like a fever that needed to be sweated out.

Their stars had been crossed, their fates sealed, ever since he was just a naïve baker's son and she the terrified daughter of a dead miner, all alone together and clinging to one another in that horrible damp dark cave.

He was scarred, inside and out. But so was she. And underneath all the scarring she was still a woman and he was a man. Eventually – after the rebellion was over and done with and they were back in Twelve, slowly piecing together their shattered lives – they discovered each other with their hands and their bodies and their hungry mouths.

Their desperate, physical need for one another became magnetic, irresistible, practically overnight. It didn't take long before Peeta lost control, patience – before he lost all of his resolve for anything but her. He hadn't meant for it to happen. Neither of them had. But some things were just chemical, electrical. Transcendent.

Their first frantic coupling was a smear on her inner thigh before either of them even stopped to ask what they were doing.

Sometimes the look in Katniss' eyes terrified him, the bright silver gone hard and molten like steel in a flame when she'd force herself down on him, to take the very last fractions of him and then beg for _more, Peeta, more_. _Deeper._ _Harder_. Her need was frightening and consuming and mirrored his own.

Sometimes, after, when they lay sweating in each other's arms, boneless and exhausted but nowhere near sated, Peeta wondered if in the end there'd be anything left of them but ashes.

Sometimes it scared her. Not Peeta, never Peeta. He'd never hurt her, not intentionally, not ever again. Not even when she begged him to, just a little bit. But sometimes when he was fucking her she'd cry anyway, the pleasure from the friction between their bodies so keen that tears would form at the corners of her eyes and she'd have to bury her face in her pillow to hide them. Sometimes she'd have to imagine herself somewhere else when there was just too much to feel, too much of _him_, those times he'd pound into her relentlessly and drive the fires higher instead of sating her hunger.

And sometimes, afterwards, she'd cry a little because everything was so raw when they finished, the emotional sting sharper than the one between her legs, where her ragged fingernails made it sore when she tried to make it stop. It made her feel empty and alone whenever he left her body, and that feeling of emptiness terrified her more than anything had in a very long time.

There was something to be said about not letting go of all of yourself. Something to be said for holding a small piece of yourself back. But they hadn't known it would be like this. They'd never had the time or luxury to find out, or even to wonder. No one warned them what it meant to be in passion's clutches, taken up completely, to lose control like this with nothing left to give after.

So Katniss wore him on her skin and kept him in her heart. Peeta's desperate need for her dried on her breasts, the smooth dark skin near her navel, at the base of her spine. On the corners of her full lips. Her sharp teeth left bite marks and bruises on his neck and his shoulders, where she'd bite him to muffle her screams when he'd wring out one last climax from her spent body. The scratches on his back blended in seamlessly with his patchwork skin and striped him like whip marks, but it made him cry out with pleasure when she marked him, and Katniss needed to feel his fingers knotted in her long dark hair and his hands bruising her hips more than she'd ever needed anything before.

She didn't know where this path would lead them or where it might end. Neither of them did. But when being alive hurt as much as it did, you learned to take every small scrap of good in the world when you found it. And they had made this discovery together. It was _theirs_. No one could ever take it from them.

Nothing would ever hurt as good as this.


End file.
